The research discussed in this proposal will investigate several questions germane to theories of lexical access and spoken word recognition. Specifically, the proposed experiments will address issues concerning the nature of lexical competition and its effects on recognition processes. A new methodology has been developed for pursuing these questions. The proposed methodology will use a free-head mounted eyetracker to record the eye-movements of subjects who are manipulating physical objects located on a horizontal board. The experiments will set up a variety of lexical competitions by using objects whose names have phonetic overlap with each other. The object of these studies is to find a rapid on-line measure of subject behavior during word recognition tasks. This measure will help to determine the time course of lexical effects on recognition.